Life During Wartime

In 1958, I was a duty helmsman on the bridge of the U.S.S. Arneb, an ungainly naval transport ship with the lines of a tramp steamer. The Arneb had entertained kamikazes at Okinawa, and veterans of Normandy and the South Pacific ran many of the ship’s divisions. But that quarter—spring in the northern calendar, darkening autumn in the southern ocean—we had been given a kind of pass from the alerts of the Cold War. We were, among other things, tracking electrical activity on the surface of the sun, from the far south of the Indian Ocean. On board was a team of astrophysicists, biologists, and other savants. It was the last of the Antarctic expeditions mapped out by Admiral Richard Byrd, and it was known as Operation Deep Freeze III.

By October of 1965, I could watch the opposition to the war in Vietnam forming up outside my bedroom window. Nearly a thousand American troops had already died in the faraway fighting, which looked so close on our TV screens every night, and upward of a hundred and forty thousand—drafted inner-city blacks and down-home white country boys, by the look of them—were there, without notable result. A month later, my wife, Carol, and I joined friends and strangers aboard a bus that took us in a caravan to Washington, where we became part of twenty-five thousand antiwar demonstrators outside the White House and then over on the lawns sloping up toward the Capitol, where we cheered speeches by Bella Abzug and Benjamin Spock and others, and even slipped away for a furtive cultural visit to the Smithsonian. We hated this blood-soaked war—for weeks at a stretch it seemed as if nothing else were on our minds—but the tone aboard the bus trip and during that long day’s outing was upbeat, almost lighthearted. Our companions—my old college pal Spencer Klaw (he’d been the editor of the Harvard Crimson) and his wife, Bobbie, who was Carol’s associate at American Heritage, and the Klaws’ youngest daughter, Margy—were friends we sometimes joined in November for football games in New Haven and Cambridge, and this embarrassing sense of overlap and gala middle-class smugness about our protest was something we noticed and, in our ironic self-awareness, remarked on. War protesting was more fun than Ivy League football. When our bus stopped at one of the mall-like gas stations on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a big laugh when the women aboard (who outnumbered us men by about three to one) liberated the men’s rest room. If we sound naïve now, it would be easy to assume that the most pathetic thing about us was our notion that we might make a difference, and change things. Only we did.

It was a Saturday in 1984. I was playing with my little brother, Kenechukwu, near the water tank in our large, flower-filled compound in Nsukka—the dusty, serene university town in eastern Nigeria where I grew up. My mother stood by the back door and said, “Bianu kene mmadu.” Come and greet somebody. Our new houseboy had arrived. He was sitting on a sofa in the living room, his legs cradling a black plastic bag that held his belongings.

I was in Abidjan in 2000, shortly after General Robert Guei’s bloodless Christmas Eve coup, which eventually helped to usher in the bloodshed of the past six years in Ivory Coast. At the time, there was a small contingent of United States Marines in the city—the U.S. Embassy Guard. They were housed in a spacious apartment in a downtown high-rise in the Plateau district. I was in my first year with the Peace Corps, and whenever I was granted a break from my posting in the bush I’d travel to the city, to a Peace Corps-run hostel that was always crowded with volunteers. Now and again, eager to spend time with the white women among us, the marines would invite us over. They were well provisioned: alcohol, air-conditioning, and all the latest magazines, CDs, and DVDs. When they called, we’d round up a couple of cabfuls of the willing, and then happily dig into the marines’ top-shelf goods. The women needed little coercing—they enjoyed the Snickers bars, People magazines, and Bacardi as much as anybody.

In February, 1991, I got an editorial job with the magazine Naši Dani (Our Days), and instantly left my parents’ house, where I had, embarrassingly, lived until the age of twenty-seven. I rented a place in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Kovaċi with Davor and Pedja, two friends who also worked for Naši Dani. Our previous experience was in radio, so we had to learn quickly how to bring a jolt of immediacy to a biweekly magazine. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was devoted largely to the demonstrations in Belgrade, which Slobodan Milosevic crushed with tanks. It was the first blood spilled by the Yugoslav People’s Army, and we knew that the flow would not stop there. By spring, the war in Croatia was well on its way. We received reports of atrocities; we published photos of decapitated corpses, and an interview with a Serbian militia leader, now awaiting trial in The Hague, who once promised to gouge out Croatian eyes with rusty spoons—as though regular spoons were not bad enough. At first, such horrors could be treated as exceptions to the rules by which we lived our lives, particularly since the Yugoslav-Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would return to normal. But we soon began reporting on Army trucks transporting arms (their cargo officially registered as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs were the majority. We covered parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karadzic and his henchmen made not so veiled threats. Everyone but us was preparing for an all-out war.

The hotel’s elevator shaft was next to my room, and when the elevator hit the ground floor it made a muffled echo boom that sounded exactly like a bomb. The elevator sounded like a bomb; thunder sounded like a bomb; construction clangs sounded like a bomb; a door slam sounded like a bomb; bombs sounded like bombs. Firecrackers thrown by kids sounded like sharp, close Kalashnikov fire; a car backfiring sounded like a single shot, unanswered, and nothing to turn your head about.

In early 1966, I was catching a ride on a helicopter out to a battle on the central coast of South Vietnam. Once there, I intended to hook up with an infantry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division that was going into action. Both of the pilots were lieutenant colonels, helicopter battalion commanders in the same 1st Cav. I was sitting on the bench seat behind them, with two enlisted machine gunners on either side of me. The colonels were amusing themselves by slapping the tops of the palm trees that covered the area with the skids of the helicopter. It was dangerous play. The slightest miscalculation could send the helicopter spinning into the ground under full power and we would all die. Jesus Christ, I thought. All I want is a helicopter ride and I draw two lieutenant colonels behaving like a pair of fucking cowboys.